Your perception, your subjectivity, your position, you are involved. It brings the viewer into the painting. The art’s not really on the wall, it’s in your perception. – Mary Corse
Los Angeles-based painter Mary Corse has used tiny glass microspheres, the same highly reflective material used in highway pavement, in her paintings since 1968. Corse’s clear glass beads refract and disperse the light amongst the pebbly surface of Untitled (White Inner Band Beveled). As the viewer moves in front of the piece, the simple image shifts slightly, with the central band disappearing, darkening, and shimmering depending on the light and point of view. Perception takes priority in her canvases, and the beveled edges assert the work’s flatness as it seems to hover in front of the wall. Born and raised in California, Mary Corse’s work shares similarities to her contemporaries in the Light & Space movement of the 1960s and 1970s, along with a geometric simplicity seen in the work of American Minimalism. Her paintings reside in public and private collections throughout the US, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Guggenheim Museum.